Vapid And Dishonest: The “Hubris” of Atheism

What can be more frustrating/amusing/annoying/curious/frightening for an atheist, than a theist who tells people why atheists are atheists, clearly without an attempt to actually ask atheists. We had it with the “Why are atheists so angry?” bunk last year, where many fell for the loaded question, never bothering to question if atheists were in fact so angry.

It’s the kind of homework that rhetoric can trick you out of doing, or if you are of a fundamentalist bend it’s the kind of homework that you actively avoid. Faith is the distance between knowledge and belief and the fundamentalist is one who conflates their belief and knowledge; they believe therefore they “know”. For the fundamentalist, homework is a threat because cognitive dissonance and rigid faith (conflated with “knowledge”) don’t mix.

I should say that I use the term fundamentalist in a broad sense, not only covering religion but of all knowledge systems. A fundamentalist Australian Cricket Team fan may “know” of the strength of character of their favourite player, but accounts of sledging, sleazy behaviour and racism are discounted if not ignored or even lionized. A far stretch for the more honest Australian Cricket Team supporter.

So it is that Rod Dreher has gone about ignoring the nature of atheism out of his “knowledge” of its hubris. It is a singularly dishonest and un-scholarly approach.

Material to his case, Dreher quotes a rather sad and misleading piece of atheist-hate propaganda by Larison;

Perhaps the most stunning thing about atheism is the sheer presumption of it. I don’t mean simply the presumption against God, which would be enough in itself, but the presumption that you and a few other adventurous souls have figured out something that the vast majority of mankind has never known about a subject for which the atheist can obviously have no empirical evidence one way or the other…

(Larison by way of Dreher, 2007)

Now any good scholar can see three fallacies in this statement. The first is a straw man; the presumption against God is a trait of “Strong atheism” and most atheists are “weak atheists” hence the “presumption against God” is not a trait of most of those that Larison targets. Weak atheists simply have no belief in God where as strong atheists have a belief in no God; weak atheism is a state of “pure disbelief.”

Secondly and quite obviously is the argumentum ad populum; just because so many people believe in a God does not mean that there is a God. The truth of a God (or any other statement of fact) does not follow from how many people have faith in the truth of a fact (unless the fact just happens to be what people’s opinions are).

Thirdly is the shifting of the burden of proof. Strong/positive claims require substantiation where as negative claims do not. The belief in no God requires empirical evidence, which Larison states quite clearly, but the non-belief in God does not. It is important to note that Larison and Dreher are both gnostic in their belief; their claim of the truth of God is positive, hence the call for empirical evidence applies to them as well as well.

Thus, Larison by way of sophistry and rhetoric, ignores his burden of proof and dumps it on a bunch of atheists who it doesn’t belong to.

Now if this was all so hard to work out, one could forgive both Larison and Dreher as simply mistaken. However, it is actually quite easy to work out, especially for someone with the resources afforded to the pair of them. One need only trundle into the archives of alt.atheism to see the distinction between hard and strong atheist and that the former is far more numerous. One can see how people become atheists and how it is far from a position of hubris (seriously, show me a new born child and I’ll show you someone with no belief in God.)

Wikipedia has the info, so does Austin Cline’s writing on About.com, and the topic of the epistemology of atheism has been on the books since the 19th century. Indeed, there is growing research into how people’s default epistemology influences their beliefs. This isn’t obscure knowledge.

So why oh why, is Dreher who presents himself as an educated man (which I believe to be the case) along with Larison, who I will assume is the same, why are they pushing a libel against atheism based on premise which are so obviously untrue? The answer is quite simple; Dreher and Larison are inculcated in a movement that does not value honesty the way it should.

To Dreher and Larison’s culture, honesty is a problem and as a result their scholarship is lacking. They believe that atheists are especially flawed because of their atheism, they believe that Godlessness causes all sorts of historical maladies for which it is not responsible. Their culture relieves them of the burden of having to back their arguments against atheism with reason, fact or truthfulness.

As such, their contributions to discussions of these matters are vapid and dishonest. I’m wondering how Dreher’s tales about atheists stack up against the ninth commandment.

~ Bruce

P.S. Thanks go to Romana for bringing this to my attention